9. Twyborn? Tri-born? Or some lives as they might have happened?

The Twyborn Affair¹ comes late in Patrick White’s oeuvre.  The only sizeable works that came after were Flaws In The Glass (1981), his autobiography, and Memoirs of Many in One (1986), which, the title page tells us, is by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray and edited by Patrick White.  The editor’s name is given in bold caps, to make clear who’s in charge.  There’s also a fragment of a family chart to tell us who Alex Demirjian is, and we need it, because names fly thick and fast in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’, a piece of deliberately unaccommodating writing, with Patrick letting the reader know how s/he will be treated for the duration of the book.

I mention this aspect of Memoirs of Many in One because it’s a book that goes even further than The Twyborn Affair in rejecting much of what readers might expect a novelist to offer.  In The Twyborn Affair White wrenched the novel onto the terms that it satisfied him to give us, and in Memoirs he went even further.  My focus will be on The Twyborn Affair, but some of its tendencies, some of its behaviour, may become clearer if we keep the later book in mind.

What to say about The Twyborn Affair? [read more]